Three ways Doximity might make money with a smartphone medical app for physicians

Last week we broke the news that the smartphone app startup founded by Epocrates co-founder Jeff Tangney had gone live and was now available for free download from Apple’s AppStore. Here are three strategies that Doximity is currently exploring for their business model (admittedly, very similar business model to Epocrates):

“The base product will remain free but we plan on providing a premium version to hospitals with enhanced communication and other features. This type of model worked well for us at Epocrates. Signing up a hospital will also quickly increase our physician user base,” Tangney told iMedicalApps in a recent interview. “Another potentially lucrative option is physician surveys. We would never sell our subscriber list. However, like we did at Epocrates, we could invite our member physicians to participate in ccasional surveys for honoraria. Since we have such detailed information on physicians’ practices, targeted information like this tends to be very valuable. Physicians can always opt out, if they are not interested. Lastly, we could mediate physician recruiting. Currently, most recruiters cannot target their offers very specifically. About 8% of physicians change jobs every year and, on our platform, they have a much higher chance of finding a job that matches their interest. Again, we would not share out contacts but post the messages ourselves. This type of disintermediation has been a major source of revenue for LinkedIn.”

Tangney also indicated that Doximity believes eprescribing is cumbersome through mobile apps like Epocrates because it requires the user to enter patient information each time — patients lists are not an easy thing to integrate, Tangney said. Tangney said they are also exploring some ways of integrating physician communications around EMR data and acting as the “glue” for the EMR data that is missing.